BSD-Powered helloSystem 0.8 Performance Against Linux On AMD Zen 4

[rogerx]

Mike finally did some work and ran some useful performance statistics!

Good job Mike!

Hopefully we'll see more operating system comparisons, and/or useful application comparisons versus wasting time playing games.

[jacob]

When did Fedora become the king of Linux distros? Not only in terms of performance, but overall cleanliness, stability, etc.

It used to be Ubuntu, wasn't it?, long time ago...

Last year I switched from Ubuntu to Fedora form my main desktop OS and I'm not looking back.

[jacob]

Anytime there is such a large discrepancy the issue is nearly always clock speed or some SIMD not being used.

In this case, the Linux distros all have AMD's Boost cpu frequency scaling active, BSD has a known issue with this technology not always activating.

There's your performance difference.

Well it IS a performance difference. A desktop OS user doesn't care why it's slower, but he or she cares a great deal that it is slower.

[sophisticles]

Well it IS a performance difference. A desktop OS user doesn't care why it's slower, but he or she cares a great deal that it is slower.

The point is that if it's slower because of clock speed, then it can be fixed, sometimes easily such as setting the cpu frequency governor to performance from power saving; same thing on Windows, the default is balanced but performance is also available.

If it's because of SIMD, then sometimes recompiling with different flags will fix the issue but if it's something with the basic way the OS is structured then that can't be fixed by the end user.

[Classical]

On old Intel CPUs I would say FreeBSD has the same CPU performance on my system as Clear Linux in most of the benchmarks I've done, this is a 10 year old CPU.

The advantage of FreeBSD over many desktop Linux distros is that you don't use Snap and Flatpak. So app launch times are slightly faster on average on FreeBSD compared to Ubuntu and Clear Linux.

So FreeBSD 13.1 is a snappier desktop experience than what you see in Ubuntu and Clear Linux.

[cooperate]

On old Intel CPUs I would say FreeBSD has the same CPU performance on my system as Clear Linux in most of the benchmarks I've done, this is a 10 year old CPU.

The advantage of FreeBSD over many desktop Linux distros is that you don't use Snap and Flatpak. So app launch times are slightly faster on average on FreeBSD compared to Ubuntu and Clear Linux.

So FreeBSD 13.1 is a snappier desktop experience than what you see in Ubuntu and Clear Linux.

Flatpaks launch very quickly, unlike snaps.

[kylew77]

So FreeBSD 13.1 is a snappier desktop experience than what you see in Ubuntu and Clear Linux.

Classical, how would you say the security of FreeBSD compares to Linux? I know OpenBSD is more secure but FreeBSD some sources say more secure than Linux others less.

[Classical]

Flatpaks launch very quickly, unlike snaps.

I've run the benchmarks and Flatpak is faster than Snap, but still slightly slower than native deb/rpm packages or slower than FreeBSD's standard packages as well. Now it could be that this difference has been eliminated in recent months, but one year ago they were not exactly the same startup speed.

Flatpak isn't the only thing I meant. Eg specifically Clear Linux has a problem that GIMP starts up 2 times slower than on Ubuntu. This has already surfaced in several years-old reviews, but it is still the case today.

More generally, I can say from experience that FreeBSD is very snappy in launching apps and many popular Linux distros start the same apps slightly slower, generally speaking I mean. in many apps there is of course little difference. But I'd say FreeBSD scores slightly better than Linux in terms of app startup times, responsiveness, and app stability.

FreeBSD can be one of the best desktop systems, also in terms of performance in apps. The FreeBSD browser performance in Firefox and Chromium is generally slightly higher than on AlmaLinux. In most desktop apps, especially if you choose the light and fast variants such as Claws Mail, feh, Viewnior, Thunar, etc. FreeBSD in daily use is exactly the same or a better experience than any Linux system. And these are the kind of 'light apps' that desktop users use 90% of the time.

Classical, how would you say the security of FreeBSD compares to Linux? I know OpenBSD is more secure but FreeBSD some sources say more secure than Linux others less.

OpenBSD and NetBSD both focus more on security than FreeBSD. For example, these two have certain features that are enabled by default and are not currently enabled in FreeBSD 13.1 by default. For example, the memory access randomization that will be activated by default in FreeBSD 14. FreeBSD has more developers than NetBSD, so more eyes on the code. FreeBSD leaves much of the security up to the administrator, which doesn't always work out well for less experienced administrators.

If you consider security to be your number one priority and don't care about performance then I wouldn't choose FreeBSD and rather NetBSD or OpenBSD. But FreeBSD is still a system that you can easily make more secure than most Linux systems. Also, less malware is being written for FreeBSD than for Linux/windows/macOS/iOS/Android/ChromeOS simply because hackers aren't going to go to great lengths to develop malware for a system that hardly anyone uses on the desktop. Hackers are smart enough to know that this is not a good effort/result ratio.

[kylew77]

If you consider security to be your number one priority and don't care about performance then I wouldn't choose FreeBSD and rather NetBSD or OpenBSD. But FreeBSD is still a system that you can easily make more secure than most Linux systems. Also, less malware is being written for FreeBSD than for Linux/windows/macOS/iOS/Android/ChromeOS simply because hackers aren't going to go to great lengths to develop malware for a system that hardly anyone uses on the desktop. Hackers are smart enough to know that this is not a good effort/result ratio.

Thanks Classical!